Did you know I always thought you were braver than me? Did you ever guess that that was why I was so afraid? It wasn’t that I only loved some of you. But I wondered...

It struck her how sad it was that all of them had grown up on top of one another like small animals in a too-small cage, and now would simply scatter. And that would be...

Something, somewhere, knows what’s best for me and promises to keep sending me people and experiences to light my way as long as I live in gratitude and keep paying attention to the signs.

Finding yourself and creating a life that feels authentic and safe is the hardest, most important work that we will ever do and for girls, especially young girls, there is no one more equipped to...

I tried on different versions of myself. I was so many different girls…

Where’d the days go, when all we did was play? And the stress that we were under wasn’t stress at all just a run and a jump into a harmless fall

Never did the world make a queen of a girl who hides in houses and dreams without traveling.

The one thing I was good at was winning scholarships and prizes, and that era was coming to an end.

One of the greatest tragedies of growing up is the discovery that your parents- and your teachers, and your sports heroes, and your favorite actors, singers, YouTube sensations- are fallible. Adults don’t know all, and...

It’s not always easy being her daughter.’ I think,’ she said, ‘sometimes it’s hard no matter whose daughter you are.

She didn’t like being twelve. It felt like someplace between who she’d been and who she was about to be. It felt like no place at all.

Becoming a man means doing the right thing even though it may be hard or difficult. Boys do what is easiest. A man does what is right, whether easy or not.

I don’t think I’d have been in such a hurry to reach adulthood if I’d known the whole thing was going to be ad-libbed.

We’re meant to stay connected to our hearts, you see. Feeling our feelings, present in the moments we’re given. But we don’t do that. And that’s when we get in trouble. …We mature and take...

… but I believe that music can change a life, because it changed mine.

If growing up means it would be beneath my dignity to climb a tree, I’ll never grow up, never grow up, never grow up! Not me!

I called his broken promise heartbreaking, and he called it growing up. Oh, that’s mature—blame it on maturity.

Oh! Polly thought. Why aren’t all girls locked up by law the year they turn fifteen? They do such stupid things!

Growing up changes morethan playground gamesand body shapes.

Such is life. We grow up. Planets like Tiny get new moons. Moons like me get new planets.

I won’t say ours was a tough school, but we had our own coroner. We used to write essays like “What I’m Going to be If I Grow Up

The older I get the more mixed up life seems. When you’re little, it’s all so plain. It’s all laid out like a game ready to play. You think you know exactly how it’s going...

You move on. You move back. On because you’re always getting older, back because there’s always a set of habits and routines to catch you and suck you back in when your guard is down.

Youth is but the painted shell within which, continually growing, lives that wondrous thing the spirit of a man, biding its moment of apparition, earlier in some than in others.

I really believe that there is an invisible red thread tied between him and me, and that it has stretched and tangled for years — across oceans and lifetimes. I know that it won’t break...

He looked at me, that first day, like he had just found something he’d lost a thousand years ago.

I wanted only a familiar voice, someone who knew me. Not some earlier, larval version of myself. . .

You can believe what you’ve been told. You can imagine in vivid detail the things explained to you. You may even feel emotions assumed to accompany the related experience. But you absolutely cannot know something...

It’s alright, just wait and see, your string of lights is still bright to me. Who you are is not where you’ve been. You’re still an innocent. It’s okay life is a tough crowd, 32...

He knows that if his father had been a different man, or his mother another women, he would have been the same. He would have lived all his years the same way. They played no...

Ready, fire, aim.

We got a saying around here about our corn, ‘it grows knee-high by the Fourth of July.

And I realized that some things just don’t work that way. Life isn’t a fairy tail. And the person you fall in love with doesn’t always love you back. But that’s ok, because at the...

She has given me a way out.

Ah man. I remember the days of lying to my mother about a boy. Once I had a boy hidden in the closet and of course Mom wouldn’t leave, so I finally had to pretend...

I nodded again, but I knew I would not grow up to drive a bulldozer. It would be awful to be dirty all day like these men. I didn’t say it, but at best I...

How awful it was, thought Tessa, remembering Fats the toddler, the way tiny ghosts of your living children haunted your heart; they could never know, and would hate it if they did, how their growing...

I want my life to be the greatest story. My very existence will be the greatest poem.Watch me burn.Love always, Charlotte

The moment you realize that life will hurt more than your death. While existing, we’re forced to become acquainted with sadness. There’s no antibiotic for the ridding of distress, and no alleviation of these intervals...

Maybe you never stop feeling like an eight-year-old in front of your parents. You resolve to be your mature self, to react in this considered way rather than that elemental way, to breathe evenly from...

I am a kind of joke, but the question is: which kind? My job is to keep everyone guessing.

The way surviving hard winters makes a tree grows stronger, the growth rings inside it tighter

I was happy, but happy is an adult word. You don’t have to ask a child about happy, you see it. They are or they are not. Adults talk about being happy because largely they...

Because…sometimes I think you meet people and they make you better, even if you’re not with them forever.

Growing up gorilla is just like any other kind of growing up. You make mistakes. You play. You learn. You do it all over again.

I wonder how long it will take for me to feel as adult inside as I look outside.

They resumed walking. Alex felt an ache in his eyes and throat. “I don’t know what happened to me,” he said, shaking his head. “I honestly don’t.”Bennie glanced at him, a middle-aged man with chaotic...

Even if we try to conform to ideals and strive for perfection, we will always be pulled back to our core identity because it’s the path of least resistance for our souls – an energy...

In the old days, when travelers would get lost, they would follow the stars and I love that idea. I wish that I could rely on something as simple and magnificent as a star for...

You can hide things from the world, but you can never hide things from time.